The first Internet was a communications system funded and built by researchers for military use. This Internet, originally known as ARPANET, was embraced by the research and academic communities as a mechanism for scientists to share and collaborate with other scientists. This collaborative network quickly evolved into the information superhighway of commerce and communication. The Internet explosion was due, in part, to the development of the World Wide Web (WWW) and graphically-based Web browsers, which facilitated a more graphically-oriented, multimedia system that uses the infrastructure of the Internet to provide information in a graphical, visual, and interactive manner that appeals to a wider audience of consumers seeking instant gratification.
As the technology underlying transmission bandwidth has grown in conjunction with the accessibility to such increasing transmission bandwidth, a new paradigm for the old idea of Internet collaboration is emerging that takes advantage of the modern graphical, visual world. This new paradigm is also driven by the advance in real-time or time-sensitive data transmission technology, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, and the like. Non-Internet videoconferencing, which has generally never been able to completely supplant teleconferencing as a viable means for reliable communications, is slowly fading away in favor of Internet-driven technology, such as collaborative electronic meetings. Services, such as WEBEX COMMUNICATIONS, INC.'S, WEBEX™ electronic meeting or collaboration services offer the ability for users to connect, at least initially, across the Internet to share voice, video, and data in real time for meetings, presentations, training, or the like.
In such collaborative meeting environments, a virtual meeting room typically is made up of several meeting objects which are generally containers for presentation information, such as slides, video, audio, documents; computer applications, and the like, that are themselves contained within the container of the meeting room. These meeting objects are typically placed into a static arrangement on the actual electronic meeting interface. Therefore, chat objects may be set on the bottom right of each meeting interface screen, while slide or other main presentation objects are set on the left half of each meeting interface screen. Once the meeting begins, each of the meeting participants, both presenters and viewers, usually see the same static meeting interface with the presenters information loaded thereon.
In some circumstances, however, meeting participants may not see the same static meeting interface, or, at least, see it in the form that the meeting room creator intended. When creating the meeting canvas or interface, the electronic meeting system presupposes a certain minimum display size. Thus meeting objects are designed with certain size parameters and the whole meeting canvas is designed to fit into a certain minimum size. As electronic meeting technology advances, it is becoming more possible for users at devices other than standard personal computers, whether desktop or laptop, to connect into the electronic meeting. These users may connect into the meeting using mobile phones, personal data assistants (PDAs), and the like. However, these devices usually have substantially limited display and processing capabilities. Therefore, an entire meeting canvas, designed for display on a standard computer display, will simply not fit on such a limited display in a meaningful and useful size. Instead of shrinking an entire standard-display sized meeting canvas down to the size of a mobile phone display, users accessing an electronic meeting using such limited capacity devices will usually only participate in the voice portion of the electronic meeting. Thus, these meeting participants will be unable to participate in much of the data collaboration that such electronic meetings are known for.